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China’s underground drainage networks are difficult to inspect, expensive to repair and easy to overlook until a road collapses or a city floods. A new specialized model launched in Guiyang is designed to make that work more systematic.
Guizhou’s power system is becoming a testing ground for an AI problem that is easy to describe but difficult to solve: how to coordinate renewable sources that rise and fall on different schedules.
China’s domestic AI chip industry is receiving a powerful demand signal, but the challenge is changing. It is no longer enough for a local accelerator to demonstrate that it can run an existing model at inference.
China’s attempt to turn data into a more usable AI input is moving from national rhetoric into city-level trials. On August 30, the National Data Administration said it would place a new batch of data-annotation pilots in 32 cities, a program intended to direct labeling capacity toward manufacturing, medical care and transportation.
ChangXin Memory Technologies has taken an unusual route through the U.S.-China technology dispute: a lawsuit in Washington. China’s leading producer of dynamic random-access memory chips, known as CXMT, has sued the U.S. Department of Defense over its designation as a Chinese military company.
China’s artificial-intelligence buildout is often measured in chips, model releases and national capacity figures. In Guizhou, it is also visible in a quieter question: what does a data-center strategy change for the places that host it?
China’s national data authorities say the country had reached 2.45 million PFLOPS of intelligent-computing capacity, measured at FP16 precision, by the end of July.
Lightstandard is betting that the next bottleneck in artificial intelligence will not be only the number of available accelerators, but the speed and energy cost of moving data between them. The Chinese optical-computing company said it had completed multiple financing rounds during the past year and was approaching a post-money valuation of RMB20 billion.
Greater Bay Area AI Computing Tech has reported a sharp first-half shift from a mixed infrastructure business toward AI computing services. In an HKEX filing released on August 28, the Hong Kong-listed company said revenue for the six months to June 30 reached RMB2.55856 billion, an increase of 1,020.9% from a year earlier.
The second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing were designed to show what machines can do, but the event also became a test of the digital infrastructure needed to manage them.
A new Beijing start-up is betting that the next bottleneck in Chinese artificial intelligence will not be the supply of any single processor, but the difficulty of making many different processors work together. Bolun Zhihui, an AI infrastructure company established in April, has completed a tens-of-millions-of-yuan angel round, according to Zhidx.
Renesas Electronics has opened a Physical AI & Robotics Lab in Beijing, placing the Japanese chipmaker inside one of the world’s most active markets for industrial and humanoid robotics. The facility will be used for system demonstration, validation, and joint development of next-generation robotic systems, according to Renesas’s August 27 announcement.
Shanghai chip startup Xijian Technology has raised nearly 500 million yuan across three financing rounds in its first year, according to a Cailian Press report. The company develops brain-inspired vision chips designed to extract useful visual information with much lower power and data-transfer requirements than conventional image pipelines.
Nvidia is making a public case that the world’s fastest-growing open artificial intelligence ecosystem should run well on its technology, even when many of the models come from China.
DapuStor, a Chinese maker of enterprise solid-state drives and data-center storage products, plans to seek a Hong Kong listing after reporting a sharp first-half recovery. Its board has authorized a proposed Main Board float in Hong Kong through H shares, while leaving the offering’s timing and size for later approvals and filings.
China’s AI infrastructure race is usually described in terms of graphics processors, data centers, and power supply. Mucang is betting that another layer will become equally important: the network chips that allow thousands of accelerators to exchange data fast enough to work as a useful cluster.
For years, Chinese IT-services companies were judged mainly by their ability to implement enterprise software, integrate systems, and support large digital-transformation programs. iSoftStone’s latest results suggest that the center of gravity is moving.
China’s domestic AI-chip sector is entering a new financing stage. Enflame Technology, one of the country’s prominent GPU designers, will open subscriptions on September 2 for a planned 6 billion yuan, or roughly US$892 million, listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market. The deal is not simply another technology flotation.
Taiwanese prosecutors have turned a chip-control concern into a detailed criminal case. Nine people were indicted over the alleged illegal export of artificial-intelligence servers to China, according to a Reuters report carried by the Taipei Times.
Xiaomi has moved its chip program from a promised next step to a three-part product roadmap. On Aug. 24, the company unveiled the Xuanjie O3 smartphone processor, the O100 AI accelerator, and the D100 processor for autonomous-driving workloads.
